I am gonna repost here what I wrote on Discord yesterday.
Pinned tab originally was indented as a way of just saying “don’t open other notes here”. Then, in a second moment, it was added a separate concept “but instead reuse/overwrite” a tab in the adjacent tab group.
Many users did not like 1) either the apparent randomness of which tab was going to be recycled or 2) that another tab was going to be touched at all.
Some of these behaviors are a refuse that made sense when we had a pure tiling (panes) interface, now we have a mix of panes (tab groups) and tabs.
With the recent change, we are back to the simple “pinned=don’t open other notes here, don’t touch this”, without the second part “but instead reuse/overwrite” a tab in the adjacent tab group"
Beyond the user facing simplicity, it helps us code-wise to have one consistent way where notes are opened and not have to account for multiple options when adding new features. Adding a toggle cannot be the answer to every, because it increases the cognitive load for new users who have to learn/understand what the toggle does and for the long term maintainability of the code. Plugins are there for customizability.
Reusing a note that is already open in a different tab is an orthogonal topic and you can follow this FR for that: